A Crowdsourcing Smartphone Application for Swiss German: Putting Language Documentation in the Hands of the Users

Jean-Philippe Goldman, Adrian Leeman, Marie-José Kolly, Ingrid Hove, Ibrahim Almajai, Volker Dellwo, Steven Moran


Abstract
This contribution describes an on-going projects a smartphone application called Voice Ãpp, which is a follow-up of a previous application called Dialäkt Ãpp. The main purpose of both apps is to identify the user’s Swiss German dialect on the basis of the dialectal variations of 15 words. The result is returned as one or more geographical points on a map. In Dialäkt Ãpp, launched in 2013, the user provides his or her own pronunciation through buttons, while the Voice Ãpp, currently in development, asks users to pronounce the word and uses speech recognition techniques to identify the variants and localize the user. This second app is more challenging from a technical point of view but nevertheless recovers the nature of dialect variation of spoken language. Besides, the Voice Ãpp takes its users on a journey in which they explore the individuality of their own voices, answering questions such as: How high is my voice? How fast do I speak? Do I speak faster than users in the neighbouring city?
Anthology ID:
L14-1212
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
3444–3447
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/214_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jean-Philippe Goldman, Adrian Leeman, Marie-José Kolly, Ingrid Hove, Ibrahim Almajai, Volker Dellwo, and Steven Moran. 2014. A Crowdsourcing Smartphone Application for Swiss German: Putting Language Documentation in the Hands of the Users. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 3444–3447, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
A Crowdsourcing Smartphone Application for Swiss German: Putting Language Documentation in the Hands of the Users (Goldman et al., LREC 2014)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/214_Paper.pdf